Glen De Vries

A month after taking a suborbital space trip alongside Star Trek actor William Shatner, medical-technology entrepreneur Glen de Vries has died in a New Jersey small-plane crash. New Jersey State Police identified de Vries, 49, as one of two people killed on Thursday November 11 2021 when their single-engine Cessna 172 went down in a wooded area shortly after takeoff from Caldwell, N.J. The other fatality was Thomas P. Fisher, 54, NJ.com quoted authorities as saying. De Vries was the co-founder of Medidata Solutions, a medical software company that was acquired by Dassault Systemes in 2019 for $5.8 billion. He bought a ticket for an undisclosed price from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to go on the company’s second crewed suborbital spaceflight in October – and trained alongside Shatner as well as Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen and Blue Origin executive Audrey Powers. Medidata co-founder Glen de Vries was named Life Sciences & Healthcare Vice-Chair for Dassault Systèmes in July 2021. de Vries drove Medidata’s mission, from 1999 through Medidata’s acquisition by Dassault Systèmes in 2019, of “powering smarter treatments and healthier people” by advancing transformation in clinical research with technology, non-traditional ways of thinking, and industry collaboration. Over more than two decades, de Vries worked with the largest pharma companies, small biotechs, and medical device companies across tens-of-thousands of clinical trials. As the Vice-Chair of Life Sciences and Healthcare, he leverages the Medidata platform, including billions of records from millions of patient volunteers across virtually every therapeutic area, along with the broader scientific, manufacturing and virtual twin capabilities of 3DS to transform not just the creation of new therapies, but their ultimate delivery to patients around the world. Articles and papers by de Vries have appeared in Applied Clinical Trials, Cancer, The Journal of Urology, Molecular Diagnostics, and other journals. He serves as a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University and is the author of The Patient Equation (de Vries & Blachman, 2020). de Vries received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology and genetics from Carnegie Mellon University, worked as a research scientist at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and studied computer science at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematics.